1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of digital image processing and, more particularly, to a method and system for recognizing and assessing surgical procedures depicted in a video.
2. Description of the Related Art
Cataract surgery is one of the more common surgical procedures involving the eye. It is important for ophthalmology residents to learn to perform cataract surgery proficiently. For classroom training purposes, the cataract surgery process is divided into several major stages, and a trained supervisor will assign each of these stages a numerical grade. To increase the efficiency of evaluating residents learning cataract surgical techniques, the use of videos has become common. While the use of videos is a comprehensive way to evaluate surgical techniques, the review and grading of these videos is a time consuming manual process. What is needed is a system and method to increase the efficiency and speed of the surgical technique evaluation process.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a computer based evaluation system for cataract surgical techniques. It is another object of the present invention to provide a computer based evaluation system for cataract surgery videos. It is another object of the present invention to provide a computer based evaluation system for cataract surgery that recognizes each of the surgical stages of cataract surgery. It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a computer based evaluation system for grading cataract surgical techniques.
These and other objects of the present invention are not to be considered comprehensive or exhaustive, but rather, exemplary of objects that may be ascertained after reading this specification with the accompanying claims and drawings.